Under the Lake

27

Bo drove slowly out of town, north, then west along the lakeshore. All the car’s windows were down, and the scent of pines blew faintly through. He remembered when he was in Korea; in the worst of times, when he wanted to summon some feeling of home, he would conjure up that scent, cool and evergreen.

The valley had smelled like that, too, before the lake, except when hay was being cut, then the two scents had mixed in a perfume that had been headier than anything he had experienced since. He still loved the pine. The smell of new mown hay made him claustrophobic and ill.

He circumnavigated the shining water in an unhurried fashion, taking in the trees, with their first hint of autumn color, and the light bouncing and playing on the lake’s surface. Switzerland was beautiful, too, he remembered, but the thought didn’t make him feel any better.

Everything was in place. The corporation had been formed – Central Europe Security – there was an accommodation address in Zurich, with an answering service on the telephone. The managing director was a Swiss lawyer who held the same position with God-knew-how-many other such paper corporations. An ad had been placed in a law enforcement journal, seeking applicants for a job with the company. The two dozen applicants had received letters saying that the job had been filled. Bo’s application had, of course, been accepted. He had a stock of letterheads with which to outline the terms of his great good fortune, when the time came. The time was growing near.

He passed Taylor’s Fish Camp and turned east along the south shore of the lake. The grocery store where John Howell had kept him from being blown away passed on his left. On the outskirts of the town, Bo stopped the car and got out. A freshly painted wrought iron fence separated him from the cemetery. He found the gate and walked in. He had not been here for years.

It had been an oddly sympathetic thing for Eric Sutherland to do. After years of fighting the valley people for their land and finally getting it, he had, quite unexpectedly, exhumed the bodies from the valley churchyard and reinterred them here, at his own expense. Nobody had really thought about the cemetery, except, apparently, Sutherland.

Bo walked slowly among the headstones. Family names he had grown up among – all Irish – were etched on them. Most of the plots were ill-kept and overgrown. So many of the families had left when they sold their land, and others who still lived in Sutherland apparently didn’t care. Bo, himself, had not been out here since the reinterment and consecration of the ground. He passed Patrick Kelly’s grave. The plot had space for Lorna and her children when their time came. The Kellys still thought of themselves as valley, not town.

On a little rise at the center of the burial ground, under a large oak tree, he came to his own family plot. He stopped in astonishment. The grass was thick and freshly cut, and there were flowers no more than a day old on his mother’s grave. He wondered who could possibly care about this when he, himself, had never bothered.

They were all distant figures to him. There was the small stone of his older brother, who had been retarded, and who had died at ten of polio the year a number of children had been killed or crippled by the disease. Then there were the stones of his mother, Dierdre, and her brother, Martin. Their deaths still bewildered him. When he had been in Korea, Martin had shot Dierdre in the head, then turned the pistol on himself. Martin’s mind had been going for years, people said, and had finally snapped. Bo could only remember how much they loved each other and him, and the pain of their deaths came back to him again. This was why he never visited the graves. He turned and walked quickly back to the car.

Bo sat in the driver’s seat and rubbed at his eyes. He thought about Switzerland, and the thought made him homesick for where he was. Would it be this way when he was there, being paid a handsome yearly income by a fictitious firm, living high on the hog? He didn’t want to go.

Maybe he could still save it here. Scotty and John Howell couldn’t know anything. How could they? He had been too careful. But even if they did, why should he allow them to drive him away? He began to feel an increasingly strong resolve to stay and survive. God knew, he was a survivor if he was anything. And anyway, Eric Sutherland might really come through one of these days. McCauliffe had let slip that Sutherland had made a new will. Bo wondered what was in it. There might be a lot to stay for, after all.

It had been a long time since Bo had killed anybody, but to preserve what he had here, to keep from being uprooted from a place he loved, that might be a price worth paying again. Anyway, if he had to, he could find a way to do it and get away with it. The thought of doing it to Scotty stabbed at him, but, he was beginning to see, it might not be possible to avoid it.

“I thought you intercepted the letter.”

“I did, but when he didn’t hear from Neiman’s, he must have called them.”

“Well, you’re fucked, now, Scotty.”

“So give me some advice. You’re the ace reporter, what do I do now?”

“Do? Why, you get your ass out of here in a hurry, that’s what you do.”

“Why?”

“Why? Jesus, because Bo can’t let you go on doing what you’re doing. He’s got to take you out of the picture, and, probably, me with you. Listen, Scotty, take the ledger sheets to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. If you can find a sympathetic ear there, you might get somebody to get a search warrant, then swoop down on Bo and find not just the ledger sheets, but other stuff, too. There’s the passport charge. You might get a decent story out of it, yet. All this time under cover, working in his office; you should be able to get some good stuff in print.”

“What stuff? How I collected parking tickets and ran the radio on Mike’s lunch hour? Boy, that’s really sexy, isn’t it. No, I want more than that.”

“But you can’t get it, now. Don’t you see that? He’s not going to make a wrong move while you’re around – that is, if he allows you to go on living.”

“He’s going to make a move on the tenth of this month. Look at it from his angle, John. He’s pretty cocky, you know. He’ll think he can pull off this next thing right under my nose.”

“Well, he wouldn’t be too far off the mark, would he? All you’ve got is this schedule, and even though you know when it’s going to happen, you don’t know what or where do you?”

“No, you haven’t. You won’t live a week. Listen, Scotty, if you don’t pack up and get back to Atlanta today, I mean right now, I’m going to go to Bo and tell him who you are and blow your whole ball game.” Howell knew, even as he said this, that it didn’t carry much conviction, but he felt he had to try to get her to protect herself.

“He already knows who I am, smartass, or thinks he does. If you do that, I’ll come up with a good story. I’ll tell him I was dipping into my expense money at the paper and got fired and changed my name out of shame and came up here to lose myself. Anyway, if I go, you’ve got to go, too. He’ll know you know everything I do. How can you find out about the O’Coineens then?”

That stopped in his tracks for a moment. “No, no,” he continued, but with even less conviction, “if he brings it up, I’ll just tell him that you came up here to find out if he was dirty, then couldn’t find out anything and left.”

“Oh, yeah? You think he’d buy that? Bo’s a lot more careful than that. He wouldn’t be happy until you were out of the way.”

“Scotty, please, know when you’re licked. Go.”

Scotty stood up. “I’m going to work,” she said, emphatically.

“You’re going to get blown away, Scotty.”

She rummaged deeply in her handbag. “Oh, no, I’m not,” she replied, pulling out a small revolver and waving it above her head. “I’ll defend myself if I have to.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Howell howled.

“And I know how to use it, too,” she said, triumphantly. “I took a course.”

“Yeah? What gun did you shoot with?”

“A police thirty-eight.”

“Well, what you’ve got there is a.25 Saturday night special with a two-inch barrel. Just remember that you won’t be able to hit anything more than a few feet away, and that it probably won’t stop what you hit. All that will do is just help you get killed faster.” He reached for it. “Give me that.”

She snatched it away and dropped it into her purse again. “No, sir. I’m hanging onto it, and I’ll use it if I have to.” She started for the door.

Howell felt totally helpless. “Scotty.”

She turned. “Yeah?”

“Bo knows. You know Bo knows, but Bo doesn’t know you know he knows.” Howell shook his head to clear it. “I think that’s right. Anyway, that’s all you’ve got going for you, that he doesn’t know you know he knows.”

“This is starting to sound like an Abbot and Costello routine.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t back him into a corner, Scotty. Let him think he’s in control. And for God’s sake, don’t let yourself end up alone with him, okay?”

Scotty nodded. “Okay. That’s good advice. That’s what I need from you, now, John, good advice. See you later.”

Howell watched her walk down the steps to her car, then he closed the door and leaned on it. They were in a whole new ball game, now, and he didn’t like it at all.